Skip to main content
Main

Spring Chicken, Fried

Fried chicken seasoned with salt, ginger or pepper, coated in cracker crumbs, and cooked in goose fat or poultry drippings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ginger and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 676 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Spring Chicken, Fried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and singe the chicken, then soak it in salt water for 30 minutes.

  2. Cut the chicken into pieces for fricassee and wipe each piece dry.

Season and coat

  1. Heat goose fat or poultry drippings in a skillet.

  2. Season each piece of chicken with salt and ground ginger or pepper.

  3. Roll each piece in seasoned sifted cracker crumbs.

Fry

  1. Fry the chicken in the skillet, turning often.

  2. If the chicken is large, steam it before frying.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Ginger + parsleytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together676 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Chicken + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,494 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Chicken + parsleytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,314 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Main protein that cooks through to tender meat while its outside browns.
Cracker crumbs
Form a crisp coating that browns and seals in moisture during frying.
Goose fat or poultry drippings
Fat that conducts heat evenly and adds rich flavor to the fried coating.

The step that matters

Steam large pieces before frying. Thick pieces can burn or brown on the outside before the centre cooks through. Steaming first cooks the interior gently, so the frying step only needs to crisp the coating.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, ginger):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Corianderfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, ginger. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More fried chicken recipes

with Tomato Sauce 6Italian 6Oven 6with Cream Gravy 5Virginia 5Marinated 4 See all 214 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes